Visualization and Data Fusion for Cybersecurity by Rich Zuech

As data scientists, sometimes we need to take a step away from pure number crunching and gain a better understanding through Visualization. For Cybersecurity, Multi Sensor Data Fusion (MSDF) can be employed to achieve superior Cyberspace Situational Awareness. With a new application, we’ll demonstrate how to virtualize, operationalize, and visual…

For years, I’ve been wanting to blog. So, many thanks to Tim for the motivation!

What is Cyberspace Situational Awareness?

Cyberspace Situational Awareness is how a human perceives cybersecurity. In Particular, CSA is how humans employ computing to better ascertain cyber threats versus normal situations. If humans can utilize computing tools with more meaningful situational awareness, then Cybersecurity can be improved with CSA. Traditional cyber defenses have failed us with ancient technologies, like log file analysis. On the positive side, our human cyber defenders stand a better chance with improved Visualization capabilities. We haven’t focused correctly, on how to keep a human-in-the-loop towards cyberspace. To better Visualize cyber situations, the information from myriads of back-end cyber sensors must also improve. But ultimately, all of this back-end sensor information needs to be fine tuned for human visualization. After all, it is difficult to defend, what you cannot see.

What is our CSA story?

Tim invited me to collaborate on his CSA Project, and I’m honored to work with the Pioneer of CSA. (I believe Tim was the first to introduce the CSA concept) So far, Tim has done all the coding for application, and has done an incredible job! Not to mention, even the Visuals are beautiful. Actually, I sometimes feel as though I’m “stargazing” in cyberspace.

I’m now in the process of coding my first cybersecurity sensor, and should finish soon. Then, I’ll hop in with some Unity programming to help with the Visualizations. I’ve always enjoyed video games! Incredibly, we can use a “fun” gaming platform for something as important as Cybersecurity. Admittedly, some of the gaming elements might distract from CSA, but the gaming platform is serving us very well for Visualizations in a Virtualized Cyberspace.

What does this CSA project involve?

This Cyberspace Situational Awareness project involves interesting Research & Development topics such as:

Virtualized Cyberspace (and what seemingly seems to become more and more like Outer Space)

Multi Sensor Data Fusion (MSDF)

Graph Processing (with intriguing future opportunities)

We’ve only scratched the surface of a new frontier. And as we explore this new cyber world, we’re only discovering more and more exciting possibilities. For example, Virtual Reality seems like a nice technology to integrate into CSA. But first, we need to integrate more back-end data fusion into the application.